


Pocket Change

by redtoblack



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Aggressive Cherrypicking from Canon, Fluff, Gen, Light Angst, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, S3 AU (ish), basically magic is gone but covid isn't, because quarantine feelings etc., quarantine fic, quentin and penny as roommates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25763977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redtoblack/pseuds/redtoblack
Summary: Quentin and Penny end up sharing an apartment during quarantine. Set during season 3-ish, so magic is gone, too. How will life at close quarters treat them?
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater & Margo Hanson & Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi & Quentin Coldwater
Comments: 14
Kudos: 15





	1. i will throw your kid's cereal to the pigeons

**Author's Note:**

> I described this premise to my brother as I began writing at 4 AM one night. His response: "ah, so you're writing a sitcom." Yes, because Penny and Quentin are very fun. Feelings will also occur, because these times are hella stressful.
> 
> Black Lives Matter. Wear a mask. Take care!
> 
> Enjoy :)

Tick

Tock

Tick

Tock

The hands on the clock are black. The face is white. The numbers are black. The wall is white. Well, off-white. Eggshell.

Tick

Tock

Quentin’s phone buzzes. It rests face down on the couch. The couch is brown. The table is brown. The bookshelf is brown. Coffee. Mahogany. Mud.

Tick

Tock

The phone buzzes again. Its case is black. Quentin’s jeans are black. The hands on the clock are black. The face is white. The numbers -

“Okay, fine, Coldwater. What do you wanna do?” Penny’s voice comes out of nowhere alongside his sudden weight on the end of the narrow couch, barely missing Quentin’s feet where he lays sprawled out, staring through his fingers at the clock. Penny isn’t looking at him, instead facing pointedly towards the wall with a resigned look on his face.

Quentin flops his arm down on the couch and rolls to stare up at the ceiling with a groan. “That didn’t take very long,” he deadpans. “I mean, you only disappeared into your room, uh,” there is no watch on his wrist, but he holds it up anyway for effect, “twenty-four hours ago, so, maybe you wanna wait a little longer.”

Their state had only instituted quarantine measures a week ago, but they’d already been lying low for a while beforehand, and the tension had just kept rising. Eventually, Penny had all of a sudden stood up, announced to the middle distance that he would be in his room until he felt like coming out and if you so much as _knock on my door Coldwater_ I will throw your kid’s cereal to the pigeons, and stomped out of the kitchen.

Quentin can feel Penny’s glare without having to look. “Yeah, well, it turns out I can only spend so long in that tiny-ass bedroom before I get restless. And you’re it for company, so. Think of something.”

Realizing this might actually be a turning point in what has so far been simultaneously an emotional rollercoaster and exceptionally dull quarantine experience, Quentin sits up and blinks the focus back into his eyes.

“What time is it? Oh -” Right, the clock, the one he’s been staring at all...day? “Hey Penny, is it two in the afternoon or morning right now?” He gets an unimpressed look like he had just suggested they go out and do karaoke.

“Afternoon. Dude, how long have you been staring at that clock?”

“Uhh…” Quentin runs a hand through his hair, trying to piece together what happened. “I took a nap and woke up and it was five, so I guess that must have been AM, not PM? And then I didn’t feel tired so I just, uh, stayed here.”

Penny eyes him disdainfully. “Riveting.”

Quentin shrugs.

“Alright, whatever. You’re awake, I’m out of my room. What do you wanna do.”

And so they play Jenga, because it’s the first thing Quentin can think of that has even a chance of Penny agreeing to it. They are both objectively horrible. Penny usually loses by dropping the blocks on top of the tower with too much force, making it topple even after he’d removed them safely. Quentin usually loses by being so hyperfocused on a single block, he forgets about the structural integrity of the tower as a whole, not noticing when it starts to collapse.

Penny has laughed at him, frequently, ever since they met. Quentin can’t tell if this is still that, or if he’s having actual fun, but it feels kind of different. Like when Quentin tries to pull out a block from near the bottom and the entire tower falls into a mound around him, still holding the piece with an embarrassed grin on his face, and they burst out laughing together. It’s nice, really nice, actually. The laughter peters out in Quentin’s chest as he feels acutely how long it’s been since he had fun with someone in person, not just talking to his dad on the phone while smoking out the window or zooming with Margo and Eliot. He talks to Alice, too, or, sort of, they just...don’t usually have fun, not like the others. As for Penny, he’s never expressed interest in having fun or even being aware of the concept until today.

As they set up the wood blocks for another round (Penny keeps placing them in ones and twos, making it much harder for Quentin to put down the three blocks he likes to line up at once), he asks, “What made you come out today? And want to like, do stuff with me?”

Penny finishes a layer, but it’s badly skewed, and as Quentin fixes it, he starts the next row on top. Quentin lets himself scowl a bit, but not enough that he’d have to explain why he was annoyed, because that would probably not be helpful. Oblivious, or - equally likely - just apathetic, Penny continues his awful Jenga technique while answering.

“I got bored, didn’t see the sense in waiting this shit out for human contact when I’ve got,” he looks over at Quentin reproachfully, “at least half a human in the same apartment with me.”

Quentin makes a displeased face at Penny, but lets it slide in appreciation of his almost friendly tone of voice. “Speaking of human contact, how’s Kady?”

Penny huffs out a sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, she’s still pissed quarantine happened while I was here and she was at the safehouse, but. They’re staying as safe as they can. As little as Marina cares about anyone’s life if they fuck with her, she seems pretty serious about keeping her hedges safe from this.”

He stacks a layer of three at once, and Quentin quickly places the last three blocks which he’d been holding on to in anticipation of getting to finish the tower. It’s Penny’s turn to start, and he cracks his knuckles before tapping at various blocks to test for looseness.

“How are Eliot and Margo?”

Surprise flickers through Quentin before he can stop it, followed by a squiggle of guilt. It makes sense for Penny to ask after them, of course it does, they’re his friends too. Or something close enough to friends. “They’re, uh, fine. Still complaining they had to get stuck here instead of Fillory, but there’s not much we can do about that, obviously.” As a very selfish silver lining, Quentin is relieved they got stuck on Earth. Without magic around these days, no one can send bunnies to Fillory, and he might have gone stir-crazy by now if he couldn’t talk to them almost every day.

Penny makes an acknowledging noise, eyes narrowed on the game where he’s trying to gently place a block on top of the already swaying tower. Quentin waits until he succeeds with a triumphant smile to ask tentatively, “Have you talked to Alice lately?”

Alice is the one person they have in common, but she’s been keeping Quentin at arm’s length recently. They were already avoiding one another around the Cottage, and now that they don’t even have the option of sharing space, they’ve gone down to one brief phone call every couple of weeks. The last Quentin heard, she was holed up at one of the Library’s tiny Earth branches, helping them find a way to safeguard their materials and move some of it online.

“Not really. You?” Penny responds flatly.

“No, me either. Maybe she went back to the main branch and can’t use her phone.”

“She’d do that without telling you?”

The tower wavers under Quentin’s hand, and he has to resist the urge to hold it still.

“Yeah, probably,” he says, half sadness, half exasperation, half resignation. A feeling and a half, sure, but one that has been starting to fade, and he thinks maybe that’s for the best.

“Well,” Penny says, nudging a block out of its place in the tower’s side. “You two always were a trainwreck.”

“Gee, thanks,” Quentin snarks, folding his arms across his chest. A second later, he slowly lets them uncross back into his lap. “I mean, you’re not wrong, though.” The sleeves of his sweatshirt rest uncomfortably against the heels of his hands, and he gives them a tug to grip the worn fabric in his palms.

Penny relaxes back into his chair with an amused tilt to his face and gestures for Quentin to take his turn. “I know.”

“It’s just, I dunno, I really thought it was this, like, meant-to-be thing, you know? Like at Brakebills South it was so - uncomplicated -”

“Okay, I really don’t need to hear about your fox sex right now -”

“- like I thought it was who we were without all the bullshit? And then we get back and it’s, hey, Fillory, and hey, kill the Beast, and whoops, now you’re an evil niffin living in my back. And maybe it was just too much bullshit, or maybe, like, you can never actually escape the bullshit and it’s just, like, our fate or something.” Huffing to a finish, Quentin pauses to drag his hair behind his ear. So much for that stuff starting to fade. “Sorry, that kind of just...came out.”

Penny just glances at him while painstakingly removing a block from near the middle of the stack. It’s a shaky process, but he makes it, and then sits back to toss the block on top of the tower.

“Counter theory,” he starts to say, when the block hits the top of the tower, slides off the other side, and pulls the rest of the blocks crashing down with it.

“Shit.” Eyes narrowed in annoyance, Penny stares at the cluttered tabletop before sitting forward with a smile. “Actually, no, this is perfect. This,” he gestures broadly at the wreckage, “is your relationship with Alice. You think it started out as a tower, and got knocked over. It wasn’t. If you need to be magically turned into another species and rendered mute to decide you want to fuck, it’s a bad idea from the start.”

“That’s -” Quentin cuts himself off. He’s tempted to ignore it, fall back on the old _Penny’s being a dick what else is new_ , but Penny is also sitting in front of him haphazardly setting up the tower for a - what, seventh? - round of Jenga, so that line of thinking might be unfair. When some wisps of hair drop in front of his face, he doesn’t move to push them back, taking the opportunity to feel a little less exposed.

God, is that what happened with Alice? They were just deluding themselves that they could make it work, and maybe there hadn’t been enough there to begin with? Maybe being foxes didn’t take away the bullshit, maybe the foxes _were_ the bullshit, and oh, doesn’t that make Quentin feel like a moron.

“Okay, I might not be psychic anymore but you still think like you’re shouting into a megaphone,” Penny interrupts, almost done setting up the tower. “Say it out loud or stop thinking about it.”

A long sigh rolls through Quentin like a wave, picking up his shoulders and then dropping them several inches from where they had gathered up by his ears. He shakes himself off with a small disjointed shimmy, rolls his sleeves to the elbow, pushes his hair back, and scoots towards the table to straighten up the disgracefully wonky Jenga tower.

“Okay, let’s do this. Best of fifteen?” He quickly pulls out a loose block for the first move, placing it on top, and leans on the table to throw a friendly gauntlet of a smile at Penny, who smirks.

“Only if you wanna lose,” Penny tosses back, but his eyes are on Quentin as he pulls and - _crash_ goes the top half of the tower.

“Ooh, sure you don’t wanna make it twenty?”

“Shut it, Coldwater.”


	2. his regular self, just in a bathrobe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I _am_ still here with this! In my absence it has managed to grow both some light angst and a significant plot element entirely without my input. Enjoy.

Hot showers are one of Quentin’s favorite things. When the pressure is high and the water is nearly scalding, steaming up the air so he can feel the warmth on every inhale, there’s nowhere to be but there. No choice but to be aware of his body, as his skin flushes just on the other side of uncomfortable, soles of his feet tender and almost slipping on the smooth tile — because _someone_ refuses to let him get a bathmat — and scalp tingling cathartically where his fingers work product around in small circles. No reason to be up in his head, and every opportunity to focus on something blissfully outside of it.

And as he sits on his bed one morning in a bathrobe, absentmindedly appreciating his freshly lemon-scented hair, Quentin can’t bring himself to feel one ounce of guilt at Penny’s angry yell of, “Hey asshole, you used all the hot water!”

Laying back with a satisfied smile, clear morning light gleams from the window, capturing his gaze. Clouds drift wide and puffy in the narrow strip of sky above the buildings across the street. Most of what he can see from this angle is just brick, punctuated by windows and fluttering pigeons. It looks like a great day to go outside. If he could...go outside.

Or do much of anything, actually. With the quest on hold indefinitely, things are exceptionally pointless. He can’t even go back to grad school considering how thoroughly fucked Brakebills is these days. There is nothing to be done outside the apartment, and so, so little to do inside.

Well, at least Quentin is clean. The smell of lemon reminds him of cleaning days as a kid with his dad, when they would wipe everything down to clear the dust and leave the house smelling of citrus. So that’s one thing. At least his blanket is really soft, and Quentin wiggles his toes around in it as a cushy reminder. That’s two. He likes feeling natural morning light on his face, so the window makes three, and the fact that he is up and about early enough to appreciate it makes four. Five is that the apartment is big enough for its two occupants to have privacy, because he can feel Penny’s stomps through the floorboards and boy, is he glad they’re retreating to his bedroom instead of coming towards Quentin.

With a half-hearted sigh, Quentin rolls out of bed and considers getting dressed. It’s nearly time to check in with Eliot and Margo, and probably a 50-50 shot whether they’d make fun of his fluffy attire or not.

Quentin doesn’t want to get dressed, so those are odds he’s willing to bet on.

He settles for starting the zoom call without the camera, so he can pull up the preview first and check what he looks like, which turns out to be his regular self, just in a bathrobe, so — good enough to turn on video. At least his hair always falls nicely when it’s damp.

Of course, the affectionate vultures looking at his blank screen call him out immediately. All it takes is for Eliot to open with, “Hey Q! You’re on time today. Are you, uh, gonna turn your camera on?” and Margo pounces delightedly on the dangling thread.

“He’s definitely trying to figure out if he looks okay enough to be onscreen. Let me guess, Quentin — you’re still getting dressed and too shy to give us a show? ‘Cuz we’ve all seen the goods, honey. Or you suddenly realized you have bedhead and are scrambling to get a brush through it? Or —”

With a series of clicks, Quentin’s face and shoulders take over the blank square in the corner of his screen. “Jesus, Margo. Hi.”

Eliot hums in understanding, looking to Margo. “It was the bathrobe.”

“Mmhm. Don’t worry, Q. You couldn’t look less like a fluffy puppy if you were wearing chainmail.”

Quentin frowns at her. “Yeah, I don’t get how that is supposed to encourage my sartorial choices.”

“I wouldn’t be sure that it was,” Eliot teases, chin in hand.

Of course, even in the early morning on a day in quarantine, the two of them look nothing short of radiant. They’re dressed more casually than Quentin is used to seeing, especially because he had just grown accustomed to their royal Fillorian wear before they got stuck on Earth, but it has occurred to him that they might be physically incapable of not looking good. The makeup levels have slowly waned over the past couple of weeks, leaving Quentin to realize that both Margo and Eliot are even more attractive without it. So unfair. But sitting there now, looking at Margo with her hair in a high ponytail and mauve lip gloss, and Eliot in glasses and a well-fitted long-sleeve shirt, all he can feel about it is how much he misses them.

Sometimes, all it takes is looking at them to get saturated with it — so glad to have these two amazing people in his life, so desperate to hold onto the way it feels to share things with them. It’s good to get to see them, talk to them, feel lucky to have them, but it would be so much _better_ to be able to be _with_ them.

“Q? You good?” Eliot shifts to tap at his screen a few times, muttering to Margo, “Did our connection cut?”

“No, yeah, sorry, I’m good,” Quentin assures him in a rush, aiming to smooth over how he had just been thinking so hard he lost track of a conversation. “I was just, distracted.”

“If it was by anything other than my tits in this shirt or El’s face in those glasses, we’re going to have a problem,” Margo tells him sweetly.

Grinning at the threat, Quentin shrugs and pokes the bear a little more for fun. “I guess that’s up for interpretation.”

By the time Quentin’s hair is dry, they’ve wrapped up the obligatory summary of the past couple days, and there’s a brief silence as he tries to think of something to ask next. There must be _something_ he can ask next.

“Oh, so —”

“Hey, by the way —”

Eliot starts talking at the same time he does, and they both break off smiling. “You first,” Quentin says, with a little gesture he realizes too late the camera didn’t see.

“I was gonna say, have you thought about trying Julia again?” Eliot asks carefully, keeping his tone light.

Right. Julia. No, Quentin hasn’t tried contacting Julia again. Not since her spark of miracle magic suddenly grew out of control, not since a literal goddess came to take her away for some kind of celestial training program. She came the third time he tried a summoning — and told him in clipped, bored words that he needed to stay in the realm of mortals, that he shouldn’t try to call her anymore. And then vanished without saying goodbye.

An uncomfortable half-smile pinches at Quentin’s lips. He wills it away, with what feels like moderate success. “Uh, no. Um. I haven’t.”

The beat of silence goes on just a little bit too long before Eliot is nodding, saying “Okay, sure,” and Margo purses her lips with a, “Why not?”

“Well,” Quentin laughs, short and unamused, he’d really rather not get into this right now, or possibly ever, thanks so very much, “I don’t want to bother her, I mean, she got my last attempt, so I think she’d be here if she could, you know?”

Margo crosses her arms. “I get it, but you’re the one she’s most likely to listen to, and we could kinda use her help in this life or death situation, so you wanna try again or what?” She’s not actually mad at him, not yet, but there’s a definite air of expectation.

Squirming under her gaze, Quentin lets out a relenting puff of air. “Last time, she told me not to contact her again. It wasn’t.” He looks away, picking at a hangnail. “It wasn’t exactly non-threatening.”

“Okay, tell you what,” Eliot says quickly, cutting off whatever Margo was getting ready to say. “Don’t try again. Send us the summoning you found and we’ll give it a shot from here.”

He shares a moment of silent staring with Margo until she shakes her head, one eyebrow raised. “Fine, yeah, we’ll take care of it. If anything, she can get her all-powerful ass down here to give us the same warning she gave you, no harm done.”

“Okay, it’s worth a shot,” Quentin concedes. “I’ll email it to you. Just, um, be careful.”

“Careful’s our middle name, sugar,” Margo teases with a wink.

A little bit of tension unspools in Quentin’s chest, and he gnaws his lip as it’s immediately replaced by guilt — what if he’s sending them into danger? What if Julia really is as far gone as she seemed, and doesn’t let them off with just a warning? What if, even after defeating the Beast, they were always destined to fail in some way and turn on one other and end up dead and this time there wouldn’t even be a reset, just him alone with _Penny_ forever hiding from the coronavirus —

“Quentin?”

Eliot, bringing him back, like always.

“What?” Quentin, hoping they won’t comment, like always.

“What?” And he’s — confused, which makes sense, Quentin is definitely the one who derailed this.

Um, okay. It’s fine, just. Rewind. “Sorry, I — what did you say?”

“I said our middle name is careful, so don’t go falling into that shit-tornado I can see building up in there,” Margo says drily. God, she makes such, like, _aggressive_ eye contact.

“Well, my middle name is _Makepeace,_ so,” Quentin jokes.

In immediate retrospect, that may or may not have been a helpful thing to say.

“Look, that was. I just — um. You guys just really need to be safe, okay?” He salvages with a hand to his brow, resigning himself to significantly more emotional transparency than he was prepared for this morning. He hasn’t even had coffee yet.

“We’ll do our best, Q,” Eliot says, temple resting on his fist, and it feels comfortingly like a promise. “Besides, we’ve gone all-in on worse ideas before,” he adds with a wry smile.

Head nodding already, Quentin swallows, releases his bottom lip from between his teeth. “Okay. I trust you guys. Just not sure I trust Julia, right now.”

“We’ll take care of it.” Margo’s tone is solid, sturdy. Like a mountain, unmovable, or like a hammer, something that moves other things if they dare to get in her way. Quentin drinks in her surety, swims in it, suddenly grateful for the way her gaze seems to pierce the screen for a direct-connect with his soul. They’ll take care of it.

A deep breath, though he shifts his robe to try and make it less obvious (and has no idea if it works). “Okay,” he says again, with more feeling this time. “Text me before and after?”

“Yeah, good idea.” Eliot nods, and if it’s a little overly encouraging, Quentin tries to pretend he isn’t grateful for it.

“So, I digress. What were you gonna say?” Eliot asks, and Quentin feels his small smile get less forced in the way his cheeks stop feeling frozen in place.

“Honestly I have no idea, I had just thought of something random, I think.”

“Oh, I got one. Have you eaten today, young man?” Margo interjects, and she looks like she’s only about 10% joking.

Opening his mouth would indicate words were about to come out of it, so Quentin does not do that. Instead he looks right at the camera and gives her a winning smile, teeth and all.

Her resulting snort is worth it.

“Uh-huh, that’s what I thought. You’re going to eat something after we hang up, and I want proof.”

Her words give him a familiar mix of defensiveness and gratitude that’s basically the trademarked Friends With Margo experience, but there’s also this overwhelming sense of normalcy that feels, um. Really good. Something inside singing, _this is what it’s like, this is what you’ve been missing._ Like, quarantine-goggles. Even the stuff that pisses Quentin off is nice because it’s _there._

He lets himself roll his eyes, though, because that’s nice and normal, too. “Sure, Your Majesty.”

“I am your literal High King, babycakes, and I demand proof of life,” she coos.

“Okay, fine,” he agrees, with an airy wave of one hand.

There isn’t much more to talk about after that. None of them have a whole lot going on, exactly, and talking four times a week makes for short catch-up conversations. Well, Quentin _could_ talk about being constantly isolated, touch-starved, depressed, and terrified of the outside world to the point of physical exhaustion, but. Uh. Better not. These calls are kind of the one really good thing he’s got going. Better to leave that stuff out of it, that way he can at least — well, not _forget_ , but at least ignore it for a little while. Put it in a box and set his laptop on top, hold the lid closed for the duration of the call.

They hang up and Quentin decides to just keep his robe on for breakfast. What, it’s fluffy.

As expected, Penny’s back in his room for what will probably be the better part of the day. Quentin’s options, limited as they are by what they have, what he can make with those things, and what he is particularly willing to make at this moment, come down to toast, hot pockets, poptarts, or cereal.

Oh, and in the fridge, left-over frozen pizza. He grabs a slice and eats it cold with one hand, the cheese gone a little rubbery but not bad enough to make him heat it up. The other hand grabs a hot pocket from the freezer, which he opens with his teeth and sets in the microwave. He has attempted to eat them cold as well, but unlike pizza, they _are_ bad enough to warrant the extra step.

He sends Margo a selfie of him in front of the microwave, bored and mid-bite.

At least it’s got tomato sauce, cuz cold white pizzas are even worse, and that’s — well, that’s one thing, he supposes. At least he has... _some_ friends that care enough to make sure he’s eating, and that’s two, for sure. His hot pocket is almost done. That can be three, it actually smells really good. And his bathrobe is really like _really_ soft, that’s four. Five is...he’s breathing?

No, too melancholy. Five is — ah, there it is, five is that he got to see El and Margo today. That’s always a good thing. Even when the conversation — gets away from him, a little, there’s still that grounding, comfortable feeling he gets, like he’s in a dream. Or maybe more like he’s waking up from a dream. Whichever one of those. But it’s always good.

He stops the microwave when the timer reads _:01_ , and sets about fueling up on calories for another day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have, in fact, eaten a frozen hot pocket without heating it up. It made my teeth hurt and took a long time to finish.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr as r-dtoblack, say hi if you like <3


End file.
